Abstract

The present paper discusses about what cloud computing is and stiffen up our definition and understanding of this accomplishment. The paper explores several advantages and disadvantages including improves availability, improves performance, cost effectiveness and flexibility as naming a few. The disadvantages are complexity, labor cost, security and integrity. Three organizations namely Microsoft, Amazon and Google are analyzed in providing cloud computing services and concluded that their services are proved to be benefitial.

1. INTRODUCTION

Now a days, cloud computing is used everywhere. If you pick up any technical magazine or visit any IT website or blog and you will be sure to see get the topic about cloud computing. The only problem here is everyone does not agree what it is. If you ask ten different professionals what exactly could the cloud computing is, and you will get ten different answers. In 2008 Oracle C.E.O Larry Ellison chastise the cloud computing as the term cloud computing was overused and being applied to everything in the computer world (Cloud Computing Basics, 2013a). He also said to the group of Oracle analysis that “the computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than women’s fashion” (Chawle & Diwaker, 2012).

II. LITERATURE REVIEW

2.1 Definition of Cloud Computing

One of the best definitions provided by the literature is as follows;“Cloud computing is a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction” (Mell & Grance, 2009).

Actually, Cloud computing gets its name as a metaphor for the internet. Typically, the internet is represented in network diagrams as a cloud. It also exactly means an area of the diagram or solution that someone else’s anxiety. So why diagram is all out? It’s probably this concept that is most applicable to the cloud computing concept.Cloud computing promises to cut outfitted and asset costs and more importantly, let IT departments kept a spotlight on strategic projects instead of keeping the data centers running.But there’s more going on under the top than simply associate cloud computing to the internet. In essence, cloud computing is a construct that allows you to admittance applications that actually exist in at a location other than your computer or other internet-connected device; more often, this will be a distant data center. There are many remuneration for this. For instance, think about the last time you bought Microsoft word and installed it on your organization’s computers and installed it on all the computers, or you setup your software distribution servers to install the software automatically, then the application is successfully installed on your machines. And every time Microsoft issued a service pack, you had to go around and install that pack, or you had to set up your software distribution servers to distribute it. Oh, and don’t forget the cost of all the licenses. Pete down the hall probably, which uses Word once a month, but this license cost just as everyone gets this. This cloud computing is also convenient for telecommuters and travelling remote workers, who can just log in and can use their application wherever they are.By using cloud computing, other companies congregate our applications.So it all sounds great, right? Not so fast. Cloud computing is not pardoning. For example: while an internet outage or problems with your internet service providers (ISP) are rare, you may not be able to use your applications and do your work. Everyone will sit in one office, but if you currently have the application on your own local servers, and all those who access it are not remote, you’d be at least somewhat assured that an internet outage wouldn’t affect your application.

Discussion on Cloud Computing Services: A Selective studyV.Prasanna Kumar

Prasannasai76@yahoo.com

But it isn’t your connection to the internet that can be prone to outages. What can be done if the site you are accessing has problems? It’s already happened. On July 2008,1 Amazon’s S3 cloud storage service went down for the second time that year. A lot of applications were hosted by the company and all those services could not be accessed until techs could fix the problem. Some applications were down for eight hours (Mell & Grance, 2009).Also, there may simple applications or data that you want to be located on site. If you have sensitive or proprietary information, your IT security group may simply approve that you did not store it on someone else’s machines.You might also find that it is more difficult to combine your applications if they are geographically detached. It means, it is easier to manage and you can also manipulate your data if it is nearer to you, and not under someone’s control.For instance, if you need two applications to exchange information, it is easier to do if they both exist in the same place. If you have one application in the house and it has to connect another application on the cloud, if it is far it becomes more intricate (complicated), and more prone to failure.In a simple topological sense, a cloud computing solution is made up of several elements: clients, data centers, and distributed servers. Each fundamentals have a purpose and plays a particular role in delivering their functional cloud based on the application, so let's take a closer look.

2.2 CLIENTS

Clients are in a cloud computing manner, the exact same things that they are in a plain,old, everyday, local area network (LAN). That is quite natural, the computers that just sit on your desk. But they might also be laptops, tablet computers, mobile phones, or PDA's etc.,Anyway, clients are the devices that the end users interact with each other to manage their information on cloud computing. Clients generally fell into three categories:

1. Mobile: Mobile device includes PDA's or Smartphones like blackberry, Windows, mobile Smartphone, or an iPhone. 2. Thin: Clients are computers that do not have internal hard drives, but here the server does all the work but it displays the information. 3. Thick: This type of client is similar to our regular computer, which uses a web browser like Firefox or internet explorer which connects to the cloud (velte, 2009). Thin clients are becoming an ever more popular solution, because of their price and effect on the environment. The benefits of using these clients include Lower hardware costs: Thin clients are cheaper than thick clients because they do not contain the hardware as much as thick clients. They also last longer before they need to be upgraded or become outdated. Lower IT costs: Thin clients are managed at the server and there are only a few points of failure. Security: Main important thing that all companies required is security for their data. Here, since the process takes place on the server and there is no hard drive externally, there is less chance of malware invading through the device. Also, thin clients do not work without a server, there is less chance of being physically stolen. And for the data, since the data is stored on the server, there is less chance for the data to be loss if the client computer crashes or being stolen. Easy to repair and replacement: If a thin client dies, it's easy to replace. The box simply swapped out and the user's desktop will be returned exactly like it was before the failure. Less noise: Without spinning hard drive, less heat is generated, quiet fans can be used on the thin clients.

2.3 Data Centers

The datacenter is the place where the servers are collected and applications to which you subscribe is owned. It could be a large room in

the cellar of your building or a room full of servers on the other side of the world where you can access via internet. IT world is the place where the growing trend which is visualizing servers. That is the software which can be installed and allows a multiple instances of virtual servers which can be used. Like this you can have half a dozen virtual servers in your own desk. Here, the number of virtual servers that can exist on a physical server depends on the size and the speed of the physical server and what applications will be running on the virtual server. Cloud computing is not one size fit for all affair. There are several ways by which the infrastructure can be deployed. The infrastructure will depend on the application and how the supplier has chosen to build the cloud solution. This is one of the most provided key advantages for using cloud computing. Your needs may be so that the huge number of servers required far exceeds which you want or budget to run those in our house. On the other hand, you may be only I the need of processing power, so you don’t want to buy and run a devoted server for the job. The cloud computing fits for both the needs. This is which the company, organization,industry required. In cloud computing the term services is the concept of being able to use which is reusable, fine grained components across a vendor network. This is comprehensively known as "a service" offering with a suffix including traits like the following: Low barriers to entry, making them

available to small businesses. Large scalability. Multitenancy, which allows resources to be

shared by many users. Device independence, which allow user to

access the systems on different computers.

The services which offer the facilities are: 1. Software as a service (SaaS). 2. Platform as a service (PaaS). 3. Hardware as a service (Haas). 4. Database as a service (DaaS) (Magoules, 2009).

So now we understood and get to the question - What does cloud computing actually? Well, we have applications running on our laptops, servers, phones. Cloud computing has the potential to bring them to you. So cloud computing brings your applications, a way of presenting, manipulating, and sharing data. Like their desktop brethren, many "staple" applications exist in cloud computing, but what will be the differ in that for you is how you interact with those applications. In this the most common things are storage and database. In this section, we'll take a closer look of storage and database functionality and for developing your own interface to work with storage and database.

Cloud computing is simply stored. Here, if you lease storage space from a vendor, you are not responsible to buy equipment, pay to run it, and pay to cool it (walberg, case, durhan, & torres, 2009). That's all burden is on the vendor. But these are the different options when it reaches down to cloud storage. Database are repositories of the information with links within the information that helps us to make the database searchable. Distributed databases like Amazon's SimpleDB, spread information among the physically dispersed hardware. But to the clients, the information seems to be situated in one place (Eugene, Mutschler, stefaniak, douglas, & vazehgoo, 2008).

III. Objectives of the Study

The objectives of the study are as follows;1. To explore the advantages and

disadvantages of the cloud computing concept.

2. To investigate the services provided by the cloud computing service providers.

IV. METHDOLOGY

The present paper has referred to the secondary data available on the Internet. The study includes three companies analysis towards their provision of cloud computing services to the public.

V. EXPLORATION OF OBJECTIVES

The explored advantages and disadvantages of cloud computing are discussed below;

5.1 Advantages of cloud Computing

The advantages are discussed as follows; 1. Improves availability: If there is a fault in one database system, it will only affect one portion of the information, not the entire database.2. Improves performance: Data is situated near the site with great demand and the database systems are examined, which allows the load to be balanced among the servers. 3. Price: It is very less expensive to create a network of small computers within the power of one large one.4. Flexibility: Systems can be changed and modified without damage to the entire database.

5.2 DisAdvantages of Cloud Computing

Naturally there will be some disadvantages, including:

1. Complexity: Database administrators have to do extra work to maintain the system.2. Labor costs: With this added complexity which comes through the need for more workers on the payroll.3. Security: Database fragments must be secured and must be the sites are housing the fragments.4. Integrity: It may be difficult to maintain the integrity of the database if it is more composite or changes too quickly. 5. Standards: There are currently no standards to convert a centralized database into a cloud solution (terman, 1986).

VI. CORPORATE SERVICES After that, in the fall of 2008 Oracle introduced three services to provide database services to

cloud users (Hurwitz, Bloor, Baroudi, & Kaufman, 2007). Here, customer can license.1. Oracle Database 11g.2. Oracle Fusion Middleware.3. Oracle Enterprise Manager. This product is available for the use on Amazon Web Services 'Elastic-Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). Oracle delivered a set of free Amazon Machine Images (AIMI's) to its customers, so they could easily, quickly and efficiently organize Oracle's database solutions.

Apart from this, while your operation is not as big as Amazon S3 cloud computing, you can use the same sorts of values within your The organization to develop your infrastructure of IT.

By setting up thin clients to run the applications and services within a local server, other than their desktops, you can ease the costs of deployment and maintenance, as well as reducing power costs.Satirically, some organizations are using cloud computing to their corporate intranets. Intranets are usually used within an organization and are not accessible or used by the public. That is, a web server which is maintained in house and the company information is maintained in the cloud to access the company's private, in-house information, users have to log on to the intranet by going to a secured public web site.

There are two main components here. Client/Server computing; The servers house the applications of your organization which needs to run. The thin clients which do not have hard drive displays the results.

An application like VMware or Microsoft Hyper-V allow you to virtualize your servers, so the multiple virtual servers can run on one physical server. These sorts of solutions provide the tools to provide a virtualized set of hardware to the guest operating system. They also make it possible which is to install different operating systems on the same machine. For example, you may need Windows Vista to run one application, while another application requires Linux. It's easy to set up the server to run both operating systems.

Thin clients are used for which application program is to communicate with an application server. Most of the processing is done on the server itself, and sent back to the client again. There are some argue about where to draw the line when talking about thin clients. Some thin clients are in require of the application program or a web browser to communicate with the server. However, others require no add on applications at all. This is a class of a discussion of semantics, because the real issue is whether the work is to be done on the server and transmitted back to the thin client or not.

There are scores of vendors who offers cloud services based on variations on the vendor and their pricing models are different, as well. Let's take a look on some of the big names in the world of cloud computing briefly (arora, biyani, & dave, 2007).

Cloud computing is a growing field, and there will be new players in the market in the predictable future. The following are the three organizations selected for the discussion in the present paper.

1. Amazon

Amazon was in the one of the first company to offer cloud computing services to the public, and they are very sophisticated. Here Amazon is offering a number of cloud services, which includes

i. Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) : Elastic Compute Clouding is the service which offers virtual machines and extra CPU cycles for your organization.

ii. The Simple Storage Service (S3) : The Simle Storage Service allows you to store items up to 5 GB size in Amazon's virtual storage service.

iii. Simple Queue Service (SQS) : Simple Queue Service allows your machine to talk to each other by using this message passing API.

iv. Simple DB : Simple DB is a web service for running queries on arranging data in real time. This service works in conjugation with Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon Elastic Cloud (Amazon EC2), together provides the ability to store, process, and query data sets in the cloud.

These services are difficult to use because they have to be done through the command line. That is, if you are working in a command line environment, you should not have much trouble using the services.

You can see more about Amazon's cloud services at " http://aws.amazon.com".

2. Google

In desolate contrast to Amazon's offering is the Google's App Engine. On Amazon you get root privileges, but on App Engine, you cannot write a file in your own directory. Google removed the file write feature out of this as a security measure, and to store data you must use Google's database. Google offers online documents and spreadsheets, and encourage developers to build the features for those and other online software, using its Google App Engine. Google reduced the web applications to a create a set of features, and to build a good framework for delivering them. Google also offers handy debugging features in this. It can be found online at code "

google.com/appengine/".

3. Microsoft Microsoft's cloud computing solution is also called as Windows Azure, an operating system that allows the organizations to run Windows applications and to store files and data using Microsoft's data centers. It is also offering its Azure Services Platform, which are the services that allows developers to establish user identities, manage workflows, synchronize data, and perform other functions as they build new software programs on Microsoft's online computing platform.

Key concepts of the Azure services platform include

i. Windows Azure : Windows Azure Provides a service which hosts and manages with the low level scalable storage, computation, and networking.

ii. Microsoft SQL Services : This provides us the database services and reportings.

iii. Microsoft .NET Services : This Provides service-based implementation of .NET Framework concepts such as workflow.

iv. Lice Services : This is used to share, store, and synchronize documents, photos, and files across PC's, phones, PC applications, and web sites.

v. Microsoft Share point Services and Microsoft Dynamics CRM Services : This is used for business content, collaboration, and solution development in the cloud computing.

Microsoft plans the next version of Office to offer a browser based option so that users can read and edit documents online as well as offers the ability for users to collaborate using web, mobile, and client version office. Although Microsoft is little late to the cloud party and isn't a leader in cloud computing. That is the which the honor goes to Google and Amazon, and more and more companies are offering cloud services, so if Microsoft wants to stay competitive, they're going to pick up the pace. Microsoft cloud offerings can be found

online at " www.microsoft.com/azure/default.mspx".

ConclusionFor some, the term "Cloud Computing" is simply hype. But for others who want to embrace it, cloud computing is a great way for IT professionals to focus less on their data centers, and more on the work of information technology.

REFERENCES

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4. Eugene, L., Mutschler, o., stefaniak, j. p., douglas, t. m., & vazehgoo, m. m. (2008). Patent No. WO2008079764 A2.

5. Hurwitz, J., Bloor, R., Baroudi, C., & Kaufman, M. (2007). Service Oriented Architecture. John Willy and Sons, 2007.

6. Magoules, F. (2009). Fundamentals of Grid Computing . (F. Magoules, Ed.) CRC press, 2009.

7. Mell, P., & Grance, T. (2009). The NIST Definition of Cloud Computing. National Institute of Standard and Technology, Information Tehnology. National Institute of Standard and Technology.

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Author Profile

V.Prasanna Kumar is studying Diploma 2nd year in Computer Science & Engineering Dep. from Arjun College of Technology & Sciences as

(2014-16 batch) who presented several papers in Seminars, Presentations and National Conferences which are being published in International Journal. Presently working as a Founder, Managing Director of a virtual organization named APT Solutions which provides its services to several Corporate & Educational Clienteles.